


We Could Have Had It All

by wave_of_sorrow



Category: A-Team (2010)
Genre: Adoption, F/M, Gen, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wave_of_sorrow/pseuds/wave_of_sorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Face meets Sosa in a diner, ten years down the road, and she tells him why she really left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Could Have Had It All

She’s sitting at a table in the back of the small diner, facing the doors, and she sits up a bit and offers him a small smile when he walks in. By the time he reaches her she’s twisting her hands on the greasy tabletop and chewing her lip raw, and she doesn’t smile at him when he sits down.

“Thanks for coming, Face,” Charissa says, and takes a perfunctory sip of bitter coffee. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Right,” Face says and waits for the waitress to leave. He curls his fingers around the chipped mug, and the heat of the coffee is painful against his frozen palms. “So, what do you want?”

“Does Hannibal know you’re here?” she asks, and a few loose strands of her hair curl damply around her face with residual melted snow.

Face keeps an eye on the reflection of the door in the smeared mirror mounted on the wall behind her and says, “Yeah. He knows I’m here.”

Charissa looks into her coffee and her face twists into the sad sibling of her former smile, and she says, “He’s probably waiting in the car a few blocks down, just in case.”

“Just in case you screw me over and the MPs burst through those doors?” Face asks, and it’s angry and accusatory.

She looks up and says, “In case you need him.”

Face stops for a long moment to just look at her, to really take her in, the dark circles beneath her eyes and the tired lines across her forehead and the very first premature grey threading through her hair. She looks old and weary, and Face thinks he probably doesn’t look any better.

“Why would I need him?” he asks eventually, and it comes out tired and defensive.

Charissa smiles again, and Face realises that this is her smile now, that this pale-lipped, twisted thing has replaced the once well-loved upward curl of her mouth. “You’ve always needed him,” she says, and it’s the first time either of them has admitted to this ugly and bitter truth. “And even if you didn’t, you’d still want him.”

This isn’t the core of their problems, because it isn’t as easy as that and it wasn’t one single thing that broke them up, but this is the one thing that they only ever fought about once, and then she’d left. Seeing her now, sitting in a cold diner at the end of another long year with over a decade between who they were back then and who they are now, he thinks he loved her very much, though mostly for the wrong reasons and never enough.

“I’m sorry,” Face says, because there’s a part of him that wishes even now that they could have been enough for each other. If she’d wanted to need him a little more, and if he’d needed her a little less for quenching his loneliness and a little more for herself, they could have worked out. If she hadn’t been so scared of commitment, and if he’d been more willing to put her first and the team second, they could have gotten married, could still be married now, and he’d never have been imprisoned and he wouldn’t be on the run now and she wouldn’t have become so bitter.

She shakes her head, and he wonders what he did wrong, and she says, “It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

“What did you want to talk about, then?” Face asks, and when she looks at him he sees a soldier who’s served too long and seen too much and doesn’t want to fight anymore.

“I lied to you,” she says, and stops toying with her coffee mug to put her palms flat on the tabletop. “About why I left, I lied.”

He sighs, and rubs a hand over his face, and when he meets his reflection’s eye in the mirror he’s suddenly keenly aware of the worry lines between his eyebrows, the stubble that’s becoming decidedly more salt than pepper, the greying hair at his temples. He’s Hannibal’s age when they met for the very first time now, and he still remembers how the then Major had looked to his young self, all that experience written out in the lines around his eyes and the grey of his hair. The only thing they had in common back then, when they didn’t have any history to link them yet, was that they both looked older than they really were. However, while Hannibal seems to have gotten the aging over with quickly and early on and stayed much the same in the decades Face has known him, Face spent the majority of his youth not really aging at all until someone recently hit the fast-forward button and sped up the process.

The visible, if premature, age had always simply made Hannibal look that much more appealing, that much more experienced and captivating. In Face it only adds to the general air of weariness.

“Do we really have to do this, Charissa?” he asks, and as ever feels older than he is, and behind his own reflection he can see that it’s getting dark outside and the snow’s coming down harder.

“Yeah,” she says, and it comes out in a heavy sigh, “we do.” She fumbles with her purse, and she takes out a photograph and slides it across the table.

Face frowns at the blue-eyed girl in the bright dress, her hair sparkling like threads of gold in the late summer sunlight and her dimpled, toothy smile frozen in place in this snapshot of her childhood. There’s a smudge of chocolate ice cream across her chin. This, Face knows, is the kind of picture people look at years and years later to remember how happy they were and forget all the bad things that happened outside of the camera going _click_. And isn’t that what photographs are for?

“I don’t understand,” he says, and looks up at Charissa. “What is this?”

“This,” she says, and her mouth twists into that not-smile of hers again, “is your daughter, Face.”

“I’m sorry, _what_ ,” he says, and laughs to cover up the sinking feeling starting in his stomach and bursting across his skin.

“I was pregnant,” she says, and doesn’t look at him. “I was pregnant and I didn’t want to be. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did, and I didn’t know what to do.”

“You could have told me,” he says, and he didn’t mean for it to come out so angry.

She winces and glances at him before looking at her hands again, and she says, “I was going to, but you were off on that one op you couldn’t tell me about and when you came back it was…” She gestures vaguely, makes a face, and sighs. “So I left, had the baby, gave it up for adoption and took that job in Washington.”

He stares at her, and when he speaks his voice is low and furious, “You’re kidding me, right? This is just some fucking joke, isn’t it?”

Charissa’s face takes on a pinched, pained look and she whispers, “I’m so sorry, Face.”

The bang of his fist against the tabletop makes her jump and their coffee cups rattle, and she casts a nervous glance around the diner and the people eyeing them suspiciously.

“Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry,” Face says, and she’s as close to tears as he’s ever seen her. “Don’t you fucking dare try and make me forgive you for what you’ve done.”

“Forgive?” she asks, and her expression goes from sad to angry in a matter of seconds. “There’s nothing to forgive me _for_ , Face. I made a choice back then, and I had every right to make that choice. I didn’t want a child and neither did you!”

“How would you know what I wanted?” he hisses at her, and her eyes narrow and her jaw clenches.

“So what?” she spits, and he has to remind himself to unclench his fists. “What kind of a father could you have been? We’re soldiers, Face. We’re not cut out to raise kids.”

“You don’t know that,” he grinds out, “It could have worked. We could have been a family.”

“No, we couldn’t,” she snaps, and slaps her hand on the table, and it’s him who glances around at the other people in the diner, this time. “I didn’t want it and you would have left the second your precious Colonel asked you to. It was always him and you, long before I even met you or the others joined the team, and there’s absolutely nothing that would make either one of you walk away.”

She’s breathing hard and she looks so angry about him and Hannibal that he lets himself imagine that she might have wanted children in due time, that they could have raised the pretty girl in the photograph themselves and taken their own pictures, and it never even occurs to him to disagree with anything she said.

“Anyway,” she continues when she’s calmed down a bit, “I would never have told you about any of this if her parents hadn’t contacted me last week.”

_We’re her parents_ , Face wants to say, but he doesn’t, and he only now realizes that the girl in the picture is perhaps five years old and she must be a teenager by now.

“She died,” Charissa says, and Face flinches.

“How?” he asks, and his throat tightens painfully at the loss of something he never even had.

She sighs, and rubs a hand over her mouth before she says, “She was very ill. I didn’t,” she shifts in her seat, and clears her throat. “I didn’t ask. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought, Face. I just wanted you to know. The funeral’s tomorrow.”

“Right,” Face says, and drinks the last swallow of cold and bitter coffee. “Is that all?”

“I, uh.” Her mouth moves soundlessly for a moment, and then she says, “Well, yeah.”

“Good,” he says, and gets up. “Don’t contact me again.”

Her eyes widen and she gets up as well and grabs for his hand, and she doesn’t quite touch him. “Face, please, I,” she says, and he just looks at her, and she never really finishes that sentence. “Will you be there, tomorrow?” she asks, eventually.

Face walks away from her, and he doesn’t yet know that this is the last conversation he will ever have with Charissa Sosa, but he hopes it is. She doesn’t call after him or follow him out, because that’s not the kind of woman she is, and he leaves the picture of the daughter he never truly had on a greasy tabletop in a rundown diner because he learned not to be sentimental a long, long time ago.

When he gets back to the car he finds Hannibal leaning against the hood, collar pulled up against the cold and blowing smoke into the air. “What did she want?” he asks once Face has pulled level with him.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, and leans against the car next to Hannibal so their sides are touching from shoulder to knee.

“You alright, kid?” Hannibal asks, and Face doesn’t have to open his eyes to know there’s a worried crease between Hannibal’s eyebrows right now.

“Yeah,” he sighs, and he’s not quite sure whether he’s lying or not and he feels snowflakes fall on his skin and melt.

Hannibal says nothing, and briefly squeezes his wrist, and Face sighs a little with it. “Come on, we should get back to Murdock and BA and then get out of town as soon as we can.” Face hums in acknowledgement, and Hannibal shifts next to him before saying, “Unless there’s a reason you’d want to stay?”

Face sighs, and blinks his eyes open to find Hannibal already looking at him; there’s snow in his hair and he looks tired, the lines around his eyes and mouth deeper than ever, and Face thinks they’ve all gotten old.

“No, boss, there’s nothing for me here.” It’s not quite what he means to say, but it might just be enough.

Hannibal doesn’t ask, not then anyway, and he brushes his hand over Face’s cheek before stepping around him to open the car door. “Come on, kid. Let’s go.”

Later, not that day, or that week, or even that year, but _later_ , Face will tell Hannibal, and it won’t change anything between them, except that it will. The ghost of the child Face never had will always have its own place within the fabric of the team, and they’ll never really talk about it. Face won’t have gone to her funeral, and he’ll always regret it, and he’ll spend the rest of his life wondering what her name was and what her name could have been had things been different.

All of that is still a long way off as he gets into the passenger seat of the rental car, and it’ll be another ten minutes before any of it is really going to hit him and Hannibal will pull over and hold him until he thinks he can breathe again, and for now he just leans his forehead against the cold window as they leave the street and the diner and everything in it behind.


End file.
